Irshad Manji raises key issues of free speech. If you want the truth, you don't need to respect people, but don't slight them
To Oxford, to a seminar organised by Timothy Garton Ash for Irshad Manji, a remarkable Canadian Muslim. There was one issue that came up and seems very important for discussions around atheism and free expression. How and in what sense should we respect people who think they have a duty to kill us?
I'm assuming here that we disagree with them about this duty. The case is entirely different if we agree that we deserve death and that's not entirely hypothetical: there are condemned prisoners who believe that the death penalty is just.
Manji has had numerous death threats as a result of her reformist take on Islam. She has had meetings disrupted, in one case by a man who turned out to have an AK-47 when the police raided his home. And yet she argues that the death threats are legitimate exercises of free speech, and should be countered with more speech, rather than taken down from YouTube.
Garton Ash is running an impressive project on free speech, as part of which he has put forward 10 principles which should guide us. The one under discussion with Manji was that "we should respect the believer, but not necessarily the content of the belief". This seems a completely unexceptionable liberal statement, but the more I think about it, the less I find it credible.
For a start, it rests on a distinction between two kinds of respect – or, a sceptic might say, a confusion between two quite different senses of the word. The respect that may be due to a human being, just by virtue of their being human, seems to me an essentially religious concept. It is certainly not one that can be logically proved or demonstrated: it's not even something like parental affection which is known across all cultures. This respect need not be earned and in fact it can't be. Following the philosopher Stephen Darwall, Garton Ash calls this "recognition respect".
The kind of respect that we might have for an idea is entirely different. It derives all its force from being in some way earned. Only a kindergarten teacher talks as if ideas were valuable just because they are ideas. It is the worthlessness of most assertions that makes some others worthy of respect. This second type is what Darwall calls "appraisal respect".
But we also apply "appraisal respect" to character. When I praise someone as brave, or self-controlled, or trustworthy, I am really not praising their ideas at all and in fact these praiseworthy characteristics can coexist with, and even serve, some ideas that deserve no respect at all.
Finally, there is a more primitive sense of respect which is essentially fear: I show respect to you because I fear the consequences if you think I don't. That, clearly, is not a moral attitude, though it may be one of the roots from which moral attitudes have grown.
It's worth noticing that primitive, or "street" respect – respect as fear – can be in conflict with both of the more high-minded forms. I can despise both your ideas and your character and still be afraid of you. Conversely, I could decide that you were a brutal murderer who ought to be sentenced to death while respecting – in the "recognition" sense – your humanity.
Many, perhaps most, of the people who want to close down some forms of free speech want respect in the form of fear. And anyone in favour of free speech must withhold from them that kind of respect. But is it helpful to mix up the other two, and talk about respecting persons and not their ideas?
I think not. There are some ideas that are not only wrong in themselves but which – if they are held seriously and acted upon – corrupt the character: for example, antisemitism, or the belief that it is "abuse" to bring up children as Roman Catholics. When someone urges that we should hold such beliefs and act on them, they forfeit appraisal respect. Is it helpful to say that we should still recognise and respect their humanity?
Well, we should certainly respect their human rights, which are by definition things to which they are entitled simply by virtue of being human. We should not, for instance, torture them. But if "recognition respect" goes no further it doesn't seem to add anything to our understanding of free speech. The question is not whether we should torture people who say things we disapprove of, but whether we should torture anyone, ever, at all.
There is one more twist to this argument. Telling someone they're a damn fool whose opinions are contemptible shuts most communication down. It's also contrary to the larger purpose of free speech. If you think that the cure for bad speech is more and better speech, this makes sense only if speech can turn into conversation. That transformation is elusive, as we see here every day. So if your purpose is to approach the truth, there's a tactical case for respect which looks stronger than any arguments of principle.
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